There has been no official fanfare yet about the High Line’s newest gardens, no ribbon-cutting or fête. But catbirds and mockingbirds swooped in almost before the plants were in the ground to have a look — and a feast of winterberries.
The designer of the High Line’s naturalistic plantings, Piet Oudolf, flew in from the Netherlands for a visit last week, too, to check on the progress of some recently planted areas. Mr. Oudolf, perhaps the world’s best-known contemporary landscape designer, began work on his first concepts for the park-to-be in 2004.
“They were making a park in the sky,” he said of the original vision for rehabbing a mile-and-a-half-long stretch of 30-foot-high abandoned elevated railroad bed into a public space, an effort led by the landscape architecture firm Field Operations alongside the architects at Diller Scofidio + Renfro.
In the 17 years since its first section, at 20th Street, opened, the High Line has become that and much more. Mr. Oudolf’s plant choices, evoking habitats like grasslands and woodlands, welcome some 6 million visitors a year and have beckoned to 46 bird species, 33 of bees and four of bats, plus numerous butterflies and other beneficial insects.
Various sections of the park have opened over that 17-year timeline, and some have also been reimagined more than once in that span.
The Prairie Terrace, a section atop the High Line at 17th Street, had been covered with scaffolding for nine years to safeguard visitors during construction of Faena New York, a blocklong hotel alongside the park. The walkway was uncovered last fall, and the area’s replanting was completed this August.
Mr. Oudolf thought about the proximity of the new hotel to the path in his design. He said he asked himself, “Do we need to shut things off from our vision when we walk that lane or that path?”
The answer he landed on was yes, so vine screens were erected and planted with native honeysuckle, Wisteria and Clematis. More shrubs and trees were figured in, including oak seedlings that had sown themselves into beds that had grown weedy during the construction years. Mugwort and bindweed were cast out to make the new gardens, along with nearly all the soil. But to welcome those young oaks — presumed offspring of trees planted years earlier — just enough soil was left around their roots in the hopes that they, too, may someday rise 35 feet above the elevated walkway.
The tall yellow blooms of Mohr’s rosinweed, a Southeastern wildflower, show off against “a beautiful sea” of alkali sacaton, said Richard Hayden, High Line’s senior director of horticulture, describing the airy seedheads of the Western grass. A big bluestem cultivar called Blackhawks will darken to purple and black as the season advances. The three are among 23 kinds of plants added to the High Line palette lately, bringing the total list to 583.
Seven of these will appear in Mr. Oudolf’s other new garden, at 34th Street. When it opens in the coming weeks, it will provide an improved street-level entrance to the park’s northernmost section, the Rail Yard Preserve. Map applications often direct people, tourists in particular, to 34th Street and 12th Avenue, identifying it as the start of the High Line. But it has never felt especially welcoming, particularly not the last year, while its walkway up from street level was closed for construction.
Since new paving was to be poured after years of wear, why not add some garden beds, too, Mr. Hayden remembered thinking: “I said, ‘Why don’t we provide an entrance experience that’s commensurate with how famous the High Line has become and what people expect?’”
The signs marking the area will also get an update.
“Now you go there and you think, OK, it invites you to come in,” Mr. Oudolf said. “It’s not big, but it’s very essential for that particular place.”
On planting day, strategically sited shrubs were underplanted with perennials, including Heuchera villosa Autumn Bride, various sedges and more grasses. The naturalistic plantings will soften the insistent presence of a massive parking lot to one side and a roadway on the other.
Another intention, as indicated by the 2,000 perennials finding homes in the narrow new beds at 34th Street: to create a place of abundance, bringing the sense of nature’s bounty even to a garden-size space.
With its 2,561 square feet of planting beds, the 34th Street garden may be far smaller than Mr. Oudolf’s one-acre design at Planting Fields in Oyster Bay, Long Island, which also opened this month. But at whatever scale, it is signature Oudolf.
Imminently now, finally, the 34th Street garden will no longer be closed off. “I know I’m going to jinx this by saying this,” said Mr. Hayden, “but when the 34th Street Garden opens, the entire High Line will be open and there will not be a construction shed anywhere on it for the first time in anybody’s memory.”
However, there will always be botanical adjustments, the ongoing “curating and editing,” said Mr. Hayden, that lets the living pictures evolve. If something doesn’t work, the team is always open to making changes.
“That’s called gardening, huh?” said Mr. Oudolf.
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